Why Study History?

The study of history remains the centerpiece of education in the humanities, of what once was called the liberal education. History is far from the mere listing of names and dates that made it so deadly for many of us in high school. The study of history is about problem-solving, about gathering evidence from likely and unlikely sources, about how evidence fits together to make a picture of what happened (or didn’t happen.) It is about understanding that what happened may be viewed differently depending on whose viewpoint we are taking. Historians monitor how individual efforts add up to a whole, indeed about how the slow moving resistance of those who are not necessarily empowered nonetheless can change the course of affairs.

While historians today stress the inability to ever arrive at a precise knowledge of exactly what happened in the past, our aim is to approach that many-faceted "truth" with ever-increasing understanding and to take into consideration the viewpoints of as many different participants as possible. History research includes much that is "scientific" in our approach to the use of such material as censuses and voting records, and the UI History Department has been a leader in such "quantitative" methods. Yet, undergraduate courses in History at UI are rarely filled with discussions of theory and methodology. Instead we spend time describing what happened in the past, how we know that it happened, and how that knowledge varies as our viewpoints shift.

Not only does studying history provide us with the opportunities to understand the rhetorical power of the written word, but it hones our rhetorical stills in important ways and develops our analytical thinking—abilities that carry over well into the business world, to the study and practice of law or medicine, or into our actions as citizens. History also provides an opportunity to develop skills in expository writing. Those of us teaching history at The University of Iowa make a point of having written work be part of our courses.

Historians are trained to weigh and evaluate sources, learning to know which chronicler of the Norman conquest is most likely to be reliable on which particular points, or which radio network is most likely to be able to give a balanced account and when we should expect exceptions to that balance to occur. Historians seek a deep understanding of some past or previous phenomena or society. They act as sleuths, solving mysteries by evaluating written and material evidence. They create order out of disorder by how they write up that evidence to tell stories. These skills transfer to a variety of occupations, but are important for all of us in the development of skills necessary for an enlightened citizenry. They are essential for the exercise of political life in a real democracy. Everyone in our society, as in any society, needs to know how to evaluate a newspaper account, asking what has been said and whether it has been accurately reported, as well as what has been left out. We are deluged with information both on paper and on electronic sources, and it is too easy to conclude that the media, both print and electronic, purvey "truth," until we see how often those sources contradict one another.

While history cannot solve the problems of our present age or the future, it can provide a wider view of how things have been done and could be done by a variety of human beings. Studying history is thus neither the dry bones of dates and battles, nor the memorization of methods and jargon, but an approach to the past in which we can discern real people not so different from those of the present. Indeed, even at the beginning of the last millennium, there were recognizable types. More overpowered by medical catastrophes, not as technologically advanced as they would eventually become, they were nonetheless people much like people today. They had the same range of emotions, abilities, and behaviors. It is the study of such women and men, famous and unimportant, saints and sinner, dullards and manipulators, peace-makers and peace-breakers, and the institutions they created, that we call history.

Professor Constance H. Berman
Department of History